The Green Line as a state of exception: politics of enmity and the production of (non) border regime in Cyprus

This article interrogates how the Green Line in Cyprus has become a laboratory for the brutalisation of Europe’s contemporary politics of enmity. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork and interviews with asylum seekers stranded in the UN-administered buffer zone, it demonstrates how an EU member-state normalises pushbacks, via deterrence, and the suspension of rights, despite the line’s formal status as a non-border. It argues that these practices are not aberrations but expressions of a broader racialised bordering logic embedded in the long-standing Cypriot states of exception – rooted in colonial rule, post-1963 constitutional rupture, and the island’s unresolved division but extended to produce the Europeanised Cypriot migration states of exception. In the context of Cyprus, racialised citizenship combined with sovereign exception makes the Green Line a site where Europeanisation intensifies, rather than restrains, sovereign violence. The study reveals how overlapping legal ambiguities enable the production of a precarious, racialised non-citizenry whose expendability is justified through security narratives and the geopolitics of partition. By situating Cyprus within wider shifts in the European border regime, the article advances a theoretical account of how bordering practices become brutalised, routinised, and legitimised through the vocabularies of crisis, necessity, and legality that underpin contemporary citizenship regimes.